Front Matter

A Short History of Autism 55

Asperger’s famous quotes include:

Not everything that steps out of line, and thus “abnormal” must neces-

sarily be “inferior”.

It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is

essential.

The autistic personality is an extreme variant of male intelligence.

Some people may draw comparisons between Nazism and the current stance
of the US government over climate crises or environmental insults to our
offspring while still in their mothers’ wombs, with stooges appointed who have
no scientific basis for ignoring the crises our next generation may face if carbon
pollution is not controlled.
Chaskel Leib (Leo) Kanner (generally pronounced as Conner), a Johns
Hopkins University psychiatrist, has received credit as the discoverer of autism.
Unlike Asperger, whose wisdom was buried by time, Kanner had a tendency to
make diagnostic errors and to impose his ideas on others via a haughty person-
ality. Kanner took a decidedly different view than that of Asperger, who empha-
sized a spectrum on which individuals could be placed. Kanner declared that
autism was a disorder that began in infancy, was rare, and frequently struck
with severity. His perspective proposed limited diagnostic inclusion, which
varied from the position of Asperger who emphasized an inclusive spectral
situation. Kanner viewed autism as a condition that began from the time of a
child’s birth, and negatively impacted the individual’s intellectual and social
capacity. At Johns Hopkins, he focused particularly on 11 patients; eight of
these could hardly use oral language, and three showed no capacity for speech
at all. Obviously, he dealt with patients on the left side (extreme disability) of
the spectrum while Asperger observed patients on the right side (Asperger
syndrome) of the spectrum, as illustrated in Figure 2.1.
Kanner borrowed the word autism from research involving schizophrenia,
where it was used to describe inwardness that had been perceived in adults
with a schizophrenic condition. He realized that similar conditions were

Extreme disabilityAutism Asperger syndrome

Figure 2.1 Autism spectrum disorders. There is a growing body of opinion that we should
view autism as largely independent sets of clinical features, each caused by different sets of
environmental insults, with different dose and at different gestation periods. The alternative
opinion is that autism is a coherent syndrome in which principal features of the disorder
stand in intimate developmental relationship with each other.